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The Japanese Radical Anki Deck

So I’ve begun learning Japanese, and as I discuss on my Logograms page, the first 3 steps to my plan have been to:

Tackle the Japanese pronunciation system and learn Hiragana and Katakana

Tackle the most common Japanese radicals, so that I can build the mental framework I need to actually remember Kanji

Learn the base 625 wordlist, Kanji and all.

Now in solidarity with all the folks waiting for the Japanese pronunciation trainer, I’m waiting for it too. As such, I haven’t started on step #1 yet. So…I skipped it. I’ve jumped ahead to step #2 (they’re basically unrelated anyways, so not much harm there), and in this post, I want to share some of the fruits of my labors – a 320 card Anki deck that should give you the ability to actually remember Kanji characters.

A brief intro to Radicals, for those who haven’t read the Logograms page

(Quoted from the Logograms page:) If you’re not familiar with the idea of radicals, here’s a quick introduction. When I look at the word “Apple”, I see a 5 letter word. What I DON’T see is ”A – 2 diagonal tall strokes, 1 horizontal mid stroke; p – 1 vertical low stroke, 1 curved stroke with an opening on the left, p – 1 vertical low stroke, 1 curved stroke with an opening on the left, l – 1 vertical mid stroke, e – 1 horizontal mid stroke, 1 most-of-a-circle-but-open-on-the-right stroke”. I see 5 letters because each of those symbols (A, p, l, and e) are chunked blocks in my mind. So I’m going to learn to do the same thing with Kanji/Hanzi characters.

If you want to learn the word ‘Artist’ in Japanese, you have a 28-stroke word 芸術家 (artist) to tackle. But this beast of a word is made up of a bunch of little pieces. Take a look at the first character:

芸

From the top down, it’s 艹, combined with 二 and 厶. If I knew those three characters in advance, then assembling this character (which means, roughly, ‘Art’) in my mind wouldn’t be that hard. It’s about as hard as learning a 3 letter word in any other language. My main job, then, is to make sure I know all of those component characters, so I can look at something as complex as 芸術家 and see a word composed of letters, rather than 28 individual pen strokes.

All in all, there are around 200 component radicals I need to care about. I can learn them all at once in the beginning, but it’d be more entertaining (and easier) to learn a subset of those components first (the very frequently used ones), and then start learning any new radicals I need in the context of actual words.

That’s where this deck comes in – it teaches the most frequently used radicals. On Wikipedia, there’s a list of 48 radicals that – when combined in various ways – will produce 75% of the Kanji you need for fluency in Japanese. So if you can really robustly connect those radicals to images, memorize exactly how to write each of them, and remember a character or two that contains them, you’ll have a mental framework that will enable you to remember all the OTHER Kanji that you may encounter. And if that framework relies upon concrete images, rather than translations or abstract terms (for instance, connecting 攵 to a movie director’s chair, rather than a vague concept like “ACTION”), each component radical will ultimately become more memorable and therefore useful for our needs.

Why I’m not just telling you to make your own deck

Now usually, I’d suggest that you make your own deck, and I’d tell you that it seriously didn’t take much time, it was a lot of fun, and you’d only be losing out by using my deck. But as I was making this deck for my own private use, I found that it took way more time than I was expecting, because the resources at my disposal weren’t designed the way I wanted them to be. Here’s the information I wanted to assemble:

One of the most common radicals

An image that had something to do with the traditional meaning of that radical (when possible), and if not that, then the shape of that radical, or whatever KanjiDamage was using, since I like their site so much.

1-3 other characters that used that radical, and could be described using pictures alone

A stroke order diagram

I ran into problems with steps 1, 3 and 4.

For step 1, I wanted to break down the radicals further than Wikipedia did. Wikipedia, for instance, says that 貝 is the ‘shell’ radical. But Kanjidamage breaks that into a combination of eye (目) and animal legs (the two lines on the bottom), and I liked having those little ingredients as separate cards. So each time I tried to make a card for one radical, I often ended up making 2-4 additional entries for each radical’s component parts. I ended up with 80 radicals instead of 48.

For step 3, I wanted to find characters that used that radical, that were also easy to visualize, so I could skip out on the English. Kanjidamage was good at helping me find characters that used the radical, most of the time (there were some – like Walking Person, 彳 – that took a bunch of research to figure out, since KanjiDamage and Wikipedia didn’t always agree about how they divided their radicals), but the examples on Kanjidamage weren’t specifically chosen for ease-of-visualization. So I had to search a fair bit for those

For step 4, I grabbed Stroke Order Diagrams from Jisho, but since I was using lots of untraditional radicals, like “Animal Legs” and “Kick in the nuts” from Kanjidamage, I had to do a fair bit of work to find the stroke order diagrams for these little components.

All in all, it took me longer than I’d want one of my readers to spend on this work, so I thought it’d be handy to spare you all the hassle of looking things up, so you can focus on actually learning this language.

How to make this deck your own (this part is necessary)

If all goes well, you’ll see a list of flashcards on top exactly like these:

If you click on one of those cards, you’ll see the information in it on the bottom. Here’s what you’ll see if you click on that ‘Water’ card (the 5th one down):

Now I’ve chosen a glass of ice water for this radical (I have a pot of boiling water for the other water radical, 氵). First off, you may want to choose different mnemonics for this. Do so. These are my mnemonics, and yours are better for you. Use Google Images Basic Mode to find your images, since then they’ll be iPhone sized instead of Too-Damn-Big sized. (Side note: If a word is in Italics, it’s something that KanjiDamage came up with and isn’t a standard reading of the word; it’s just a random mnemonic. So if you come across Kick in the nuts or George Michael’s Mustache, that’s what’s happening.)

Second, once you choose your mnemonic and have established your OWN mental association between the key word and the image you chose, delete the English word. That word is not going to help you learn Japanese, it’s not in my personal deck, and it screws up the way the cards look when you review them. I seriously spent an hour of my life, adding those words in, just so you could delete them. You owe me back that hour by making the associations in your head and then deleting the word.

Third, look at the example characters containing the radical, and look at the images I’m using for those characters. If you want to choose different images, do so. Your images are better than mine, because they’re yours. I have a picture in there of Los Angeles for the concept of “Hometown.” Los Angeles is probably NOT your hometown. So go back to Google images and make the images your own.

Fourth, in that same collection of example characters, look at where they contain the radical, and how they relate to the idea of the radical. In this case, urine has Water 水 on the bottom right, surrounded by the Corpse radical, 尸. Urine is corpse water. Best language ever. Make those connections yourself and create a visual story in your mind. If the connections seem random or weird, then so much the better. Streetlights are made of nails and torches. Men are made of rice paddies and flexing biceps. Silver is made of gold, the sun and a kick in the nuts. Once you’ve made your connections and you’ve changed any images you wanted to change, delete the English word here too.

Last, as a further impediment to you just grabbing this deck and studying it without following my instructions, I’ve gone and suspended all of the cards except for ‘Mouth’. Suspended cards are listed in yellow in the browser, have due dates in parentheses, and don’t show up as new cards until you un-suspend them. So every time you follow my instructions for a word and make the associations you need to make and delete the English words, then select those cards in the top part of the browser (usually 4 cards per word), and check to see that their due dates are in parentheses. You can select multiple cards by holding down shift and clicking:

Then on the top, click ‘Suspend’ and those parentheses will go away:

Now those cards are active, and you’ll see them whenever you study new cards.

But Gabe, this process sounds like work! Well of course it’s work. I can spare you the work of collecting the data in one place, but I can’t spare you the work of making the mental associations you need to make to teach yourself Japanese. Besides, that’s the fun work. It’s where you build your own language in your own head. All these flashcards are meant to do is reinforce that work.

Anyways, at this stage, it’s time for some download links. Enjoy, and let me know how it goes in the comments!

Download the zip here, unzip it, choose your deck, and double-click on it. One deck is just the Radical Deck described here, and the other’s combined with the Model Deck described on the Logograms page. If you don’t know how to use Anki yet, go here FIRST and watch the videos.

Update, 2-2-16: My Anki card models for Japanese (and the ones I’d use for Chinese) have been evolving over the past year. I’ve been posting new versions in a number of blog updates, but I figured it’d be good to combine everything into one deck. You can download that model deck here. The minimal pairs, spelling cards and basic mnemonic cards are the same as my normal model deck, but I’ve added an extra type of mnemonic card that better supports mnemonics for Kanji/Hanzi characters and an All Purpose Japanese/Chinese card that you can use for Picture Words and sentences alike (explained here).

Gabriel Wyner

I am an author, opera singer and polyglot based in Chicago, IL. After reaching fluency in German in 14 weeks with the help of the immersive Middlebury Language Schools, I fell in love with the process of language learning, going on to spend two months in intensive Italian courses in Perugia, Italy. Searching for ways to bring the immersion experience into the home, I began to develop a system that rapidly builds fluency in short, daily sessions. In 2010, my efforts paid off. I learned French to fluency in 5 months, and Russian in 9 months. After Russian, I started writing my book, working on a related Kickstarter project, and studying languages at a more relaxed pace, learning Hungarian and a good chunk of Japanese over the course of a year and a half each.

Currently learning Spanish, I am looking forward to returning to Japanese next year. My book, Fluent Forever: How to learn any language fast and never forget it, was released on August 5, 2014 by Harmony Books (Penguin Random House). My blog, Fluent-Forever.com, details my methods and provides resources for learners of all languages.

Gabe this is awesome!
I was just about to start to try making my own radical cards but I am glad you did first and wrote this post haha. I thought it would be hard but I wasn’t sure. So glad you put in the hard work. Truly amazing!

Quick question though, will this work for Mandarin Chinese?
I am assuming that most of the translations and radicals are practically the same as in Japanese. Pronunciations are different of course and I am sure I can outsource the task getting the correct pronunciations.
What are your thoughts?

Hi Phillip! I think there’s going to be a lot of overlap with Mandarin, but it’s not going to be 100%. In going through this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical in order of frequency, I’m seeing the following changes:

140 – Not using the big character. Also using flower pot vs grass
196 – dont have this one
9 – The third variant on the right I’m using as peaked roof, rather than person
130 – missing the variant on this
157 – missing this one
195 – missing this one
112 – I have rock instead of stone
96 – missing this one, though I have a variant of this as king.
187 – missing this
162 – only have the 2nd variant of this
181 – missing this
159 – i have car, not cart
163 – missing the big one. I have the small variant
170 – Msissing the big one. I have the small one as ‘wall’, not mound
119, 177, 116 – missing these (also I have a different one for cave that isn’t 116)
66 – I have the second one as director/taskmaster, but not the first
50 – I have this one as dagger/fabric
164 – I have alcohol instead of ‘wine’
156 – missing this
40 – missing this (very similar to ‘crown’ in the deck, though)
169, 190, 76, 93, 172, 78, 124 – missing these
60 – I have this as ‘walking man/go’ instead of ‘step’
113 – this is ‘altar/show’ instead of ‘spirit’, both variants
82, 137 – missing these
102 – in deck as rice paddy, not ‘field’
188, 182 – missing the big ones. variant of 182 is listed as table, not ‘wind’
98, 128, 203 – missing these
57, 19 – got these
122, 211, 147, 148, 123 – missing these
44 – got it
152, 194, 153 – missing these
37 – got it
199 – missing this and have a different radical for wheat
27 – got it
108 – missing this
31 – I just use the original ‘mouth’ for this but it’s always listed in two different spots
62,15,141,106,198 – missing
117 – missing except as an example. I have it as a combination of standing worms and terrorist..
178, 77,158,107,79,70,183,208 – missing
29 – got it
127, 39, 91, 121, 193, 134 – missing
74 – got it

Yes, add anything you need, meaning variants and anything that’s missing. I get stroke diagrams from Jisho – if it’s just a part of a bigger character, I’ll just take a screenshot of the part of the larger stroke order diagram I need.

Hi, It’s an awesome way to start off with, it really helped me out! I’m so glad you have a Chinese / Japanese section too. Now I’m wondering:

In Mandarin, what if you want to write shao1? Which has got, like multiple pinyin words, different characters.

Reading isn’t the problem, but writing seems a totally different story. Because when hearing shao1, multiple mnemonics run through your head. Even when hearing shao1 combined with other words. While when reading, your mind graps the right mnemonic.

烧 shao1, means to cook (which is genius, ”a weak fire”)

As in 红烧羊肉 hong2shao1yang2rou4. Braised lamb in brown sauce.
And many other cooked, braised, heated etc dishes.

捎 shao1, means a little. (Look like grain, which is less genius. But I’m kind of grain intolerant so that’s a little less good. For me this is easy to remember)

As in 捎等 shao1deng3. (wait for a moment)

Also, isn’t it as important to learn the most common pronunciation parts of characters too? Most characters have got two parts, meaning and pronciation.

I just learn these words by hard now, write it again and again. Skritter already saves a lot of time and it’s going great. But I was wondering if you maybe know a trick?

You are right, Chinese is a beast of a language!

*Funny note: Today I had to buy a bedding bag. I had no idea about the pinyin of this word. So I called it a ”glove for sheets” 手套的毯子 (shou3tao4 de5 tan3zi5) They immediatly understood and said 被套 Bei4tao4. Playing language games with native speakers is awesome, especially if you actually hear their reply because of your pronunciation trainer!

Phillip – I know a handful of Japanese kanji and have noticed that some have the same meaning in Chinese. After Japanese I’d like to learn Spanish, then possibly Chinese.

I’ve been working on my own radical cards, and it would sometimes take an hour to create one card. Also I had to make decisions such as, do I try to learn both onyomi and kunyomi readings, and if so, how to differentiate. From the beginning, I have no idea how a decision like this will affect future learning. Kanjidamage has determined that, for him, stroke order is irrelevant. I consider this important. Do I focus on primarily reading and memorizing the radicals now, stroke order later? If a kanji radical is also a word, should I learn the word now? I’ve been adding sound files – do I include the on, kun, both? Usually there are multiple on readings. And some kun readings are words but often they are used only with hiragana to make it a complete word.

I’ve spent a day creating cards (at 30 min – 1 hour of time each), only to go back and modify them later as I reconsider my strategy. I can’t wait to see how Gabe has handled these issues, and what strategy he has chosen.

Thank you! This deck will probably save at least 40-80 hours of work for me. And thank you for suspending the cards – also helpful! I try to have at least a 90% grasp of the batch I’m working on before adding a handful (4-5) new radicals, especially since it’s like math – with radicals, you are building on previously learned pieces, unlike the kanas, where each one stands on its own (until you get to the compound kanas). I skipped the compound kanas, as I have been able to figure them out without drills.

I’ve been trying to learn katakana for years. Using Gabe’s method – DONE!

Just abstractly knowing the on/kun of a given kanji doesn’t seem particularly useful to me, so I’m not learning those, except when learning a specific word that uses a specific reading. I’ll be blogging about that decision fairly soon!

One more comment – I personally LOVE the animated stroke order diagrams. And, as the kanjis get more complicated, the non-animated stroke order diagrams will take up more room on the card. So, the first change that I’m going to make to the cards is to change to animated stroke order diagrams. They work fine in the cards, can right click the image, copy and paste easily (no need to download, which is what I was doing initially).

Hey Samantha, could you please share with me where you get animated stroke order diagrams? I remember seeing a website with them few days ago, but can’t seem to find it now. It’d be really helpful if you could provide the info. Thanks.

About learning to write and stroke order – there are many, many sites which provide writing practice sheets for the kanas and for kanji. My favorite are geared towards Japanese children/students. I’ll post the links in a separate post.

After I master these sheets, I use Tae Kim’s practice sheets. I’d like to find other sheets which are small (many on a page) like his but which have the squares quadrisected as they do for young Japanese.

I study the cards every day, and when studying the cards stroke order is done using my finger to write in the air. I do actual writing a couple of times a week, a handful of characters as I’m trying to write nicely and accurately. I never realized until two weeks ago that there are three different types of strokes which you should learn before learning the stroke order. After you learn the three different stroke types, they are apparent in the stroke order diagrams, but not in typed text.

So, my Japanese study involves another track in addition to Gabe’s – writing. My kana/kanji study is way ahead of my writing study. Writing is considered optional by some Japanese language students due to the cell phone and computer capabilities.

In your picture you have “口 Mouth” at the top of the list of cards. But when I sort by “sort order” 口 ends up halfway down the list. Are these cards in the correct order?

Sorting by “due date” puts 口 at the top so I can get started but I’d like to be sure that my copy of the deck is actually in the right order. (Since I assume you built this deck to show the components in a particular order much like Kanjidamage and Heisig-RTK do)

Thank you so much for doing all the work to build this foundation! It looks like it’s really going to help me

Thank you so much for these, they’re really useful. (Although I ended up changing approximately 80% of the pictures).

I have one question about using this deck though. For the question of what other characters use the radical, what do you count as the right answer? Do you have to know the meanings? Do you have to know the kanji? Do you have to know the position of the radical in another Kanji? Do you need to know all the examples or just one is enough?

I found that a lot of times I can remember the mnemonics of the example Kanji but might not remember the Kanji themselves. Or would just remember the position of the radical in the example Kanji. If the Kanji uses several radicals that I already know, then I sorta think of them together (ex: ancestor = Altar+Abraham Lincoln’s hat), but if I don’t know other radicals used the Kanji is too complicated to remember.

Also one more question: is there a way to switch which one is card 1 and which one is card 2? I prefer to be asked to recognize Kanji first when learning and then asked what the Kanji itself is. (ex: see 口, I answer with mouth picture. study other cards, then asked “what’s this mnemonic for “pic of mouth”, I answer with 口）

For “What other characters have this radical” – I’ve been counting myself right if I can remember one(!) character’s *meaning*, and also roughly where it fits into that character’s kanji.

As for switching the order, yes, click on “Cards” and then the “More” button on the bottom, then “Reposition”. I can’t tell if Anki will only reposition NEWLY created cards, however. I recently did this with my new Japanese deck and I’m still seeing the old order for my old cards.

Thanks Gabe for making this radical deck. I was reluctant to try it out. I’ve used Anki in the past and eventually became frustrated with it. I had a difficult time retaining much. However, these images you put in there changed that. I no longer have to imagine the image/meaning; the image from Google does that for me. Also, as you said before, deleting the translation was helpful.

This has worked so well that I’ve started adding images for Kanji and Kanji compounds. Although, I did run into a problem. I thought I could simply remember compounds by making a story with the radicals but that didn’t work very well. I had to break the compound down into single Kanji. And, sometimes I’ve had to break those down into its simpler components. When I do this my retention goes back up.

Any updates? a friend and I have bought your book and the beta to your Japanese pronunciation trainer and we are now totally lost. haha 😀
we were so excited that we read your book twice and then finally came and looked at your website and found out its a bit different learning curve…

Hopefully you can shed more light on what to start with? I have lots of quetsions so maybe read through them before answering 🙂
hiragana, katakana, kanji or kanji radicals first?
do we learn one by the other?
are some radicals “words” too?
how do I know how to pronounce/say a radical and not in english?
if I do pronounce a radical, do I use katakana or hiragana to learn the pronunciation?
are we supposed to learn hiragana and katakana by their romaji?

I’ll stop there, but I have so many more questions!

Thanks for taking the time to do all of this! I really enjoyed reading your book!

OK! Short answer here, longer answer in the blog a bit later – after Korean gets rolling I’m going to take a break from the trainers and catch up on everything else, especially on blogging about japanese.

Start with the pronunciation trainer to learn katakana and hiragana.
then do the radical deck. It’s just connecting pictures to stroke orders – no pronunciation.
then learn the 625 word list, with both kanji and kana spellings. No romaji in the deck. If a radical happens to be a word as well, then learn the pronunciation of that word now.

I have your radical deck, and it looks promising for what we need. I was wondering if you have a spreadsheet of the radical deck contents… my daughter does better if she writes things out in the usual Japanese style (mmm… rote repetition!!!) but I think the way you’ve got things broken down into radicals, etc., will make more sense in the long run. I was going to do it myself but thought I’d ask. Thanks!

Thanks so much for the trainers! I’ve really been enjoying them! I have had one issue, when I went to open the Anki Japanese Radicals deck by clicking on “2. Mnemonics (For Radicals)” Instead of seeing the image you posted I have a different image which I’ve posted in another comment per your request. Feel free to email me at the address provided and thank you so much!

I’m in the middle of setting up phase 2 of 4 in learning Japanese. (Where the four phases are pronunciation, learning vocabulary, learning grammar, and learning the rest of the language, as you outlined in your book.) While I’m going through your pronunciation trainer and IPA deck (which are very helpful), I’m trying to set up an Anki deck for learning the kanji, radicals, and vocabulary that use it. While I’ve been doing this setup (creating new note types and card types for example), I notice certain grammar bits that I’m not sure whether I should learn now, or in phase 3, the grammar phase.

For example, Japanese nouns use counter words, such as にん (nin) for counting people, or ほん (hon) for counting long things. Should I be memorizing these counter words as I learn the nouns, or is it ok to memorize these things in a separate grammar phase of my learning? Or, to put it in a practical way, should I put counter words as part of the vocabulary cards in Anki, or should I make a separate grammar deck to test myself on counter words, and do something like “Front of card: Three ___ children went to the park. Back of card: nin.” (Obviously, I would not writing my cards in English, but hopefully you get the idea.)

I ask because in your book, you recommend learning grammatical gender as part of vocabulary, but learning the use of the word “by” as part of the grammatical phase (“My homework was eaten *by* my dog”). What is your rule of thumb to decide whether a grammatical construct is important enough to learn as part of the vocabulary phase, or whether it can be learned later, as part of the grammar phase?

I’ve been treating counters as if they were grammatical gender. My rule of thumb is if it’s something I need to learn by rote for every single new vocab word (or at least every single word in a particular class, like nouns), then I’ll use a mnemonic and grab it as I learn the vocab.

Will you be making a radical deck like you’ve done for Japanese, for Mandarin?

I too have read your book but have now gotten stuck at this point, because the time commitment to creating the whole radical deck from scratch for Mandarin, is a little daunting a task at the moment (with my busy work schedule).

Has anyone else got a Mandarin radical deck that they’d be willing to share?

Have you looked at the shared Chinese decks on Ankiweb? Look at ankiweb net shared decks chinese. (Replace the words in angle brackets with the appropriate symbols, and remove spaces.) I’m not studying Chinese, so I don’t know which decks will be useful, but try some of them to see if they suit you. I would create another profile in Anki, just to play around in, and import the deck in there. See Anki help to see how to do this.

Gabriel’s pronunciation trainer uses pinyin and pictures. After you’ve learned the first 625 words you can just start using Skritter to learn how to write and read all of these words.

Skritter is amazingly efficient, too. In 313 days, 253 hours of Skritter time later, I’ve learned how to read and write 1988 Chinese characters. Learning how to write and read the first 500 characters feels totally awfull, but afterwards you’ll get a feel of how to write or read chinese characters. I guess Japanese kanji it is the same. Even many of the sounds sound similar to Chinese, for example the word for library.

I didn’t make a radical deck for Chinese either, I”m a bit lazy on this one too, sorry Gabriel, But considering Skritter, I wonder if it you be more effeicent even if you would make one.

Just let Skritter get you through most frustating first part. Sooner or later you’ll make sense of almost all the characters.

This is a great resource. One question though. I understand that the mnemonic names for some of the radicals can be chosen arbitrarily, if they are not kanji themselves and have no intrinsic meaning. However, some radicals are kanji in their own right (for example ‘tree’) so it would make a lot of sense to use that word. My question is, how, when you are first starting out, do you know how to name them? I don’t want to use someone else’s mnemonic words. Thanks!

@Oli:
I search each Kanji character I learn on Kanjidamage, which does a pretty good job of breaking up the radicals and letting me know if they have intrinsic meanings.

That said, even when they do line up with existing Kanji, it’s often helpful to create new images that are thematically related to the old ones. For instance 周 circumference is kind of abstract, so I went with “frisbee” when I’m using that as a mnemonic.

Thank you for posting your newest decks! It’s a little unclear how to update my existing decks with your newest offering. Do you have anything written or recorded to show how to do this without screwing up my existing Anki?

I have the “Spelling rules and Examples”, “Minimal pairs”, and “Radical deck [2-28-15]” decks. I also have a vocab deck I’ve been slowly making using the 625 words pdf.
After downloading your newest deck and importing it, I now have a separate deck “Gabe’s Japanese/Chinese Deck [2-2-16]” with child decks “Minimal pairs” and “Everything else”.

Hi Scott. At this point you can just add new cards with the new card models to your existing deck, and those cards should work in the new format. If you want to modify your old cards and have them adhere to the new card models, I’d suggest you do that only after you have some experience creating cards with the new models. Then you should get a feel for how the new fields work, and then can play around with using Anki’s “Change Card Model” menu item. But backup before you do that so nothing can go terribly wrong. I don’t think we have any newer videos chatting about that yet.

I absolutely love your approach to learning Kanji. I first birthed the aspiration to learn Japanese last year. But due to school and lack of progress I eventually gave up. What I wanted to do is to practically use the information I ended up cramming. I didn’t bother about learning radicals because a lot of people I spoke with told me I didn’t need to (the rush in trying to learn was the actually reason).

But I understand now that radicals are important. For the past two days I’ve been reading your blogs and i’ve come to agree with a lot of what you are talking about because almost all of what you have shared makes practical sense. Now i’m not trying to undermine your expertise in this field (as you are already fluent in more languages than most people I know) but I am merely expressing my excitement. I plan on following your plan because i’m not afraid of hard work as long as I can vividly see progress. I look forward to learning with you all!

Hi Gabe I have the problem that Honu is having as well. The link to the Kanji radical deck doesn’t seem to be working. This seems to be happening site wide which might have happened when the site design switched.

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